Buckets and Fires

Meaningful work both enlarges students' knowledge stores and sparks their desire to wield that knowledge.

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." —William Butler Yeats

When William Butler Yeats wrote this statement, he could never have predicted that his comment would be engraved on coffee cups, quote-a-day calendars, and hand-drawn posters. In fact, it seems to be the go-to quotation for reminding teachers about the importance of meaningful work. The implication is that great teachers do not deposit knowledge into students, but elicit the understanding students already possess. When I hear this adage, I think about authentic assessment, project-based learning, and student-led assemblies. I drool.

I've come to realize, however, that this quotation doesn't capture the complete definition of meaningful work. I would delete one word and change one conjunction: Education is the filling of a bucket and the lighting of a fire. Truly meaningful work both gives students new knowledge and draws on the wisdom students already possess.

Filling the Bucket

I first realized the importance of "filling" as a student teacher in a high school in southern Maine. This high school served 1,000 students, 96 percent of whom were white and 14 percent of whom qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Many of my 9th graders had never left the state. In this context, I launched a unit on Africa with a K-W-L activity, asking students to brainstorm what they knew about the continent (K) and what they wanted to know (W), ultimately planning to probe what they'd learned (L).

"What do you know about Africa?" I asked.

"The Sahara Desert," a girl called out.

"Elephants, zebras, giraffes," another offered.

I dutifully recorded these under the K column. Then a student said, "People from Africa are lazy. They move to the United States and get free housing with satellite TV."

A few others nodded. One spoke out: "Yeah, they. . .." I cut him off before he had a chance to finish and replaced my planned K activity with a tirade on stereotypes. Needless to say, we never got to the W.

But what if we had? What did these 9th graders want to know about Africa? Or, as I now interpret this experience, what could they have wanted to know? Perhaps they would have asked more questions about the Sahara or animals. But how would their questions have invested these learners in a unit on the ancient African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai?

This K-W-L activity could not have meaningfully connected students to the upcoming instruction because they did not know enough to want to know more. The problem with a K-W-L is that it requires students to already have some knowledge on which to base their desire to learn more. The W can only be as good as the K; when student knowledge is weak, so are their questions. The bucket is too empty for meaningful learning.

If this is true, so is its opposite: The more students know, the more they want to know. I have seen this principle at work in my own classroom at Excel Academy Charter School in Boston, where I now teach. Every year, my 7th graders memorize the location of every country in the world in addition to studying material required for the content standards on ancient civilizations. They study a new continent every week and record their scores reflecting their mastery of continent knowledge on a bar graph at the front of their binder. We chart their progress and set new goals for their success locating various countries. I celebrate students' accomplishments as they master more content and help them see that knowing information is something to be proud of. On our final test on every country in the world this past school year, the class average was 82 percent correct.

Through "filling their bucket," my students become hungry for the bucket to grow bigger. They surprise me by telling me the capitals of countries. They almost throw themselves out of their chairs to figure out the answer to such trivia questions as, What is the square mileage of the land in China? or Which country's capital is Dakar? Their knowledge gives us an access point to discuss current events as they arise.

Moreover, many young people's buckets are quite sparsely filled, at least in terms of mainstream knowledge. Take my students at Excel Academy. Sixty-seven percent of our 210 students speak English as a second language, and 69 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch. What my students do not know is often surprising and frightening. Some of them confuse England and New England during the American Revolutionary War unit. Most cannot define the word rival. When I talk about the court of Louis XIV, they imagine a televised trial. In my 8th grade Government class, words in the sentence "The rebelling colonists threw the tea overboard into the harbor" present roadblocks for students. Before they can start to explain the incident's significance, they must understand the full meaning of rebelling, overboard, and harbor.

For all students, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, the bucket of knowledge must be filled to a certain level before they can comprehend important ideas in history and literature. As psychologist Daniel Willingham notes in Why Don't Students Like School? "The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge."¹ 

So why not stop with filling? If students need knowledge to acquire more knowledge, if memorization fosters curiosity rather than closes it off, and if assessing students' grasp of facts is meaningful to teachers and students alike, can't we stop there? No. Students bring valuable knowledge to any learning enterprise—kindling to spark a fire—and part of making learning meaningful is gathering that kindling.

Lighting the Fire

After my "K-W-L tirade" during student teaching, I was so annoyed that I didn't want to look at many of my students, who I now saw as unworldly and close-minded. I certainly didn't want to spend two weeks talking about Africa. I sought out an English teacher I respected to discuss my frustration.

I walked into her room and saw walls covered with student work from a recent culminating project based on Chinua Achebe's African novel Things Fall Apart. These posters proclaimed evidence of excellent student learning: detailed, sophisticated pictures and descriptions of African individuals and cities (few large mammals). I stared jealously.

"How did you do it?" I asked.

We talked about her experience and mine. I shared my negative feelings toward my students. "You'll never be able to teach them if you think that," she told me.

"I mean, I guess they are wise in their own way," I said begrudgingly.

"That's it," she responded. "They are wise in their own way. You have to believe that; otherwise you'll never teach them anything."

I now keep the phrase wise in their own way at the front of my mind with every group of students I teach—and I wish I had more than superficially believed this when I launched my Africa unit. Yes, many students' knowledge stores are terrifyingly empty. But I work to respect all my students for their wisdom. All of them have some experience or insight that enables them to access sophisticated concepts.

Because I know this, I know students can engage in complex projects requiring writing, argument development, teamwork, and creativity. We run model United Nations sessions, evaluate the one- and two-state solutions to the conflict in Israel and the occupied territories, predict the history of an imaginary place on the basis of its landforms and natural resources, and hold a mock Constitutional Convention. Students are highly focused during these activities. They often report that these assignments are their favorite in-school moments, which impress on them learning they'll never forget.

So can we stop at lighting the fire? No. If students are to complete meaningful work that leads to long-lasting learning, they must participate in challenges that build on acquired knowledge.

At the Intersection

A classroom environment based on direct instruction and memorization (constant bucket filling) will at best appear overly controlled and at worse descend into chaos because of lack of student engagement. Instruction based too much on students' existing knowledge will be an arena for short-lived opinions or shallow enthusiasms. Discussion, debate, and writing skills are meaningless if you have nothing to say.

So what happens if we combine filling and lighting? Teaching in this way requires special attention to planning and to introducing new content. I start every unit by identifying a few key concepts and break the unit down into several chunks, each tied to a concept. For each chunk, I create a "thought experiment" to introduce the concept. In planning these thought experiments, I consider the content and skill objectives that I want students to learn and then strip away content-specific terminology. I'm left with a question that can be applied to many scenarios, for instance, How does scarcity cause conflict? or How does education affect social class? I then brainstorm a situation that answers this broad question and that my students already know (and care) about. We spend as much as one class period exploring this question together before we transition to the unit-specific content and skills.

For example, in my Ancient Civilizations course, we study the Neolithic Revolution (I couldn't imagine asking students to do a K-W-L on that topic). The major content objective for the section on how archaeologists know about the past is "Students will be able to describe the work of an archaeologist, specifically the process of relative dating." The skill objective is "Students will be able to place events that occurred in the BCE era on a time line."

Stripping away the archaeology-specific terminology leaves the question, How does the position of an object help you figure out when an event occurred? The thought experiment I created was envisioning a retainer mistakenly thrown away during lunch. When I presented this puzzle to the class, we laughed and students shared horror studies of picking through miles of trash on macaroni-and-cheese day. We discussed strategies to make finding the retainer easier. I brought a trash can to the front of the room and asked, Where would you look in the garbage pail if you knew you lost the retainer a long time ago? More recently? What if six pizza boxes were thrown away in the middle of lunch, creating a clear layer? How would you decide whether to look above or below this layer?

Students eagerly explained their reasoning. Having shared their expertise in retainer excavation, they could easily connect to questions like where should an archaeologist look to find Paleolithic tools? When we were ready to move to time lines, I turned the garbage pail on its side. My students instinctively knew which ends represented the distant past or more recent dates.

This kind of mental gymnastics makes students proud of their expertise—and curious to learn the specific terminology of the lessons. It shows them how, through their background knowledge and insights, they already understand much about how the world works. They become confident in their ability to figure out challenges in the upcoming unit.

Now in my fourth year of teaching, I find that as I incrementally improve my teaching in this way, my students' performance improves as well. Every six weeks, Excel Academy monitors student learning through internal standardized tests. The social studies test uses questions similar to California's standardized test for 8th graders and the New York Regent's exam. In spring 2008, my students' average score on this internal test was 77 percent correct; in spring 2010, my students' average score was 81 percent. This year, I had to completely rewrite the 78-question final exam I had used in past years to meet my students at their higher ability level.

Even better, my kids and I enjoy the process more. Like the English teacher I respected, I'm more likely to feel awed at what my students are capable of instead of bitter about what they do not know.

At the end of every semester, I ask students to write a simile describing our class. This fall, Juan's simile especially caught my attention:

Social studies is like a soccer game. Every time you start doing it or working on it you feel happy and you want to keep on going. … In a soccer game there is always something: a new trick, new goal, new players. Social studies is the same … and you are always interested in learning more about that trick or that war or event.